Pinterest now boasts more than 11 million unique monthly visitors. According to comScore, the average Pinterest user spends 98 minutes per month on the site. The visual bookmarking website also has a higher rate of engagement than Twitter. What do all these staggering stats indicate? That Pinterest is all set to become a major player in the social media arena in the coming years. If your business is not leveraging this online platform yet, you might be missing on potential opportunities to engage your target audience.

Before we delve deep into how you can get your business up and pinning on Pinterest, let’s have a look at the top ten categories on this site.

If you want to create your business presence on Pinterest before it’s too late, given below are seven tips that you can use.

#1. Set Up Your Profile
To get started, you need to create a profile on Pinterest. Since the social media site is still in beta-invite only mode, you can ask a co-worker, colleague or friend of yours to send you an invite. Once you receive the invite, you can register on the site and complete your profile information. While filling out the profile, you should include links to your business website and social media pages. You can also include the link to the RSS feed.

[This is the new improved look of Pinterest Profiles]

Since you’re using Pinterest for business purpose, you should select the profile picture carefully. Choose a picture that represents your brand or company so that consumers can easily identify who you are.

#2. Create Boards
After you’ve completed the profile section, it’s time to start creating boards. While creating boards on Pinterest, you need to think what’s significant to your business. Depending on your specific requirements, you can create multiple boards and name them appropriately.

If you’re in an interior design business, you can create boards like ‘home décor ideas’, ‘ideas for home’, ‘dream bathroom’ and ‘kitchen makeover ideas’ among others.

#3. Upload Items (and Grow Them)
Next, you need to add images to each of the boards that you’ve created. Add at least 6-12 items (images or pins) to every board. Be careful to choose only those images that can quickly grab the attention of the user. You can also add videos.

#4. Learn the Pinterest Etiquette
Now that you’ve a business presence on Pinterest, it’s time to have a closer look at the Pinterest etiquette. Pinterest is a thriving social community and you should always remember to abide by the community guidelines. Pinterest doesn’t support blatant self-promotion. Be authentic and treat other community members with respect.

#5. Follow Other Pinterest Users
In order to grow your business presence on Pinterest, you also need to follow other users. Following other Pinterest users, re-pinning and liking their pins is vital to spread the word about your own brand. You can also choose to comment on other people’s pins as well as respond to those that are left by users on your own pins. Re-pinning and commenting on your followers’ pins is indicative of the fact that you don’t excessively self-promote.

#6. Add the Pin-It Button to Your Website
You may have added different social media buttons to your website already. Add one more – the ‘Pin it’ button (grab the code here). Placing this button on your site makes it easier for visitors to pin your visual content.

#7. Run a Contest on Pinterest
Launching a contest on Pinterest is an excellent way of creating awareness about your brand and drive social momentum among the audience. Several small businesses have already launched different types of contest on Pinterest in the past few months. If you’re sure it’s something you need, you too can announce a contest on Pinterest to fulfill your business goals.

Make sure you launch the right kind of contest (Best Pinboard, Most Repins, Sweeptakes Entries etc).

Is your business on Pinterest yet? Please feel free to share your views and opinions.

Obaidul works as an SEO manager handling client projects. He focuses heavily on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM). Also a passionate blogger and freelance writer, he shares his insightful views regularly on HelloBloggerz . You can follow him on Google Plus or Twitter.

I heard a rumour the other day that these pinning type sites have a clause in the terms and agreements that hold you accountable for any material you pin to your site. Apparently if they get sued for any reason they just pass it onto you. Not sure if it is true, have you heard? For most people this wouldn’t really affect them however you would want to be careful as a business.

I’ve used pinterest to optimize my site and the result was amazing my site was jumped from #234 to #9 in few weeks time.

The trick is we must got our website pinned and repinned by many people this is the hardest part. Most of pinterest users won’t doing repin when they aren’t like what we pinned.

I do simple thing to outsource it on fiverr and got my site pinned by more than 70 people, I don’t know how can he did it just search by typing pinterest on fiverr and you will find it.

As I know currently pinterest is best for SEO for these reason:
1. Once our website pinned it has 3 backlinks counts
2. Google interest in social media signal so it will not tagged as links farm
3. Currently pinterest links are dofollow even the image
4. Also support anchor text, it’s perfect for placing our keywords

I think the actual potential of Pinterest is yet to be explored. The visual bookmarking site doesn’t only suit industries like travel, fashion, hospitality, food, art and crafts, but it can also work for many other types of businesses.

I think it’s never a bad idea to experiment with this new platform. At the same time, I hope to hear bigger success stories from Pinterest users. We should also take a lesson or two from the way Pinterest is growing.

Never thought of having pin etiquette. Thats very true just as in any social networking nobody wants to be bluntly marketed to when they are just having fun. Pinterest is definitely a force to be reckoned with in the social marketing field.

Thank you for laying everything out about Pinterest. Our company has just joined Pinterest so i am looking forward to the results to come. I think Pinterest however is more for the creative companies than it is for niche market businesses.

Excellent post on the pinterest website. Being am fresher to this field i learned more and more from this article. It’s better to promote more and more on this page where it is more useful for the beginners.